Articles from my personal Journals
My seven-year journey to becoming a published memoirist happened while we lived in Athens, Cairo and Bangkok. Here I write about life as it happens, living abroad, being a mother, wife, sister and daughter as well as living a writer’s life.
If you wonder what it’s like being a published author, and how to write a memoir, from therapy on the page (the first drafts) through revision, editing, book design, publishing, marketing and selling your memoir, you will love these articles.
The shitty first drafts of these articles first appeared in my private journals and morning pages. When you sign up for my biweekly Cercular you’ll never miss an article. Who knows, it might just be the spark of inspiration you need to write.
Welcome to my Life & Memoir Writing Journey 🧡
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Event Photography
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Personal Brand Photography
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Headshots, Profiles & Portraits
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Brand Ready | The 7 Steps Checklist
Are you Brand Ready? Here are 7 STEPS to help you clarify your Personal Brand Story and get ready to create and impactful Personal Brand. Feel the excitement & enjoy the journey! When you’re ready, Let’s Talk! personal brand photography for women over 50 branding tips for small business owners in Ireland step 1 :…
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Dee Ryan for Mayor of Limerick
“The extent to which you know your inner child is proportional to how well you know yourself.” Vig’s Trauma Theory
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Women’s Day, Mother’s Day & Voting for Change
“Population growth is one of the most serious obstacles to world prosperity and sustainable development. … Women’s education is the single most important path to higher productivity, lower infant mortality and lower fertility.” Gro Harlem Brundtland – The International Conference on Population and Development Cairo – 1994
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Edward Scissorhands A Trauma Theory
Trauma, you now know, can be passed down from generations, but as far as you are aware, not normally through the application of a humble hairbrush. Perhaps something about the situation triggered discomfort from her childhood. You will never know.
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Moving Chaos
After 7 1/2 years abroad we returned to Ireland and our life depended into chaos.
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Time to Say Goodbye
From our sofa in Athens, Ruby and I watched Grandad’s funeral mass, live-streamed from the near-empty Cathedral of the Assumption in Thurles. Grandad was well known and much loved, hundreds would have come… only 10 were allowed.
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Make a Scene
The fundamental elements for creating great scenes in memoir. Think of the first paragraph of your memoir as the opening scene of a movie or TV series. Every story, every movie, every book starts with a scene and after the first scene follows another, and another. Scene after scene after scene makes a chapter.
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Making Memoir
The end of writing marks the beginning of marketing in earnest. I’ve been looking forward to this part for so long. I get to be online and social and build websites and newscasts and design a book cover, and figure out how to publish and then sell the book. I love all this, especially the community…
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Turning anxiety into self-awareness
I’m living in a turbulent time right now. Aren’t we all you might say and if you do, then you are right and I hope this life lesson of mine, might help a little to relieve your stress and anxiety.
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How to create a safe vessel to write from
I’m trying, I’m really trying to get on with revision, transcribing voice notes and rewriting, while the drilling continues upstairs. our Athens building block is incredibly noisy with constant building works ongoing. I’ve my AirPods in at high volume streaming Smooth Jazz on Spotify. I don’t think I can do it . . . I’m…
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Feeling Frazzled
I’m eating chocolate and feel lazy and fat, her message said, I hope you feel better than me. Nop, I’m not doing any better than you, I wrote back. . . . Swap chocolate for ouzo (while in Greece) and we’re in the same canoe.
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Connect before you React
I adapted this from Dr Shefali, who says ‘Connect before you Correct’ as a parent. I love that woman and I’m so grateful for how her work in the world and how it gives me a chance at becoming a better mother. To Connect before I React is still a lesson I’m learning. It’s not…
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Not OK
Not ok is ok Don’t be okwhen it’s not okLean into the pain in your heartwhen it breaksfor the smallest things;a mum who says ‘wait’ when you need her ‘now’a friend who says ‘no’ when you need a ‘Hell Yeah!’when you feel belittled, and not invitedwhen you feel not good enough, or out of placenot…
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Charity – The Gift of Giving
In 1910 Wallace D. Wattles wrote; “The poor do not need charity; they need inspiration. Charity only sends them a loaf of bread to keep them alive in their wretchedness, or gives them an entertainment to make them forget for an hour or two.” I wonder if Mr Wattles foresaw the big business charity have…
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The True North of Memoir
I didn’t realise revising my memoir would be this hard or take this long, but now I see what I’m here to learn. As I reread one of the though chapters I wondered, was it the abuse, or that fear we all feel when something unacceptable and wrong happens to us at an age before…
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Illness the New Normal
In 2013 a study by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) found that over 95% of the world’s population has health problems. Lower back pain and major depression ranked among the top ten greatest contributors to disability, causing more health loss than diabetes, chronic lung disease, and asthma combined. This is a bleak picture, one…
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Mormor and The Queen Mother
On this day (April 9) seventeen years ago, the most nurturing and positively influential woman, to me, took her last breath and left this life.
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Why Don’t you like me?
I always thought there where two kinds of people – those with and those (like me) without confidence. Those WITH confidence seemed more genuine. I never thought confident/genuine people liked me, maybe it was because I ‘felt’ fake. I was definitely not my self – I didn’t know how. I hadn’t even heard the word…
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The art and science of achieving goals
Apparently, most new year resolutions have fallen by the wayside by February, so what can March offer us? Is it better to sit back and wait for another year before making a new resolution, a new commitment to move closer to the life we really want? How about making a new resolution just for March?…
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Flow
There is nothing quite so luscious as getting lost in the FLOW, where you forget that you haven’t washed your hair in 3 days and you have a daughter in school, who forgot her lunch money and sent you an SOS email, which you forget to check, and Facebook and Instagram is as far from…
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Egypt ⛵️ Nile Cruise Aswan – Luxor
It’s been 12 years since the last time we went on holidays, just the two of us, without the Awesome Kid. We tingle with excitement walking through the school gate at 9 on Sunday morning. It’s the first time since Ruby started Middle School I’ve been let walk her onto campus, and today I get…
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The Captain’s Island
Dear Ones, [SEPTEMBER 2018] You may know, my father, The Captain, died in July and I went to Norway for his . . . . . . . – no, I didn’t just go for the funeral or to bury him, I went to find him or to find something I’ve lost. And I did.…
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Fear
Today feels like starting all over agin. The surge of fear swells up from my gut like burning indigestion. Halting my breath as if I’m reacting to a tiger about to eat me alive. Striking at my hip and shoulder where I carry my emotions like numb pain. At first, fear so vivid, I can…
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Judging Without Why
Last weekend, having lunch, I saw a good mum feeding her 10 year old daughter. It wasn’t a very healthy lunch and the daughter could do with healthy. I judged her, and I don’t even know her WHY. A few days ago I went on a field trip with Ruby’s school. The day was extra…
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A day of imperfection
My god, what am I like? So yesterday I wrote about showing up on time for our Write-In’s and today I turn up late for Ruby’s reading celebration? – What the heck, like? I hate it when I find my own ‘behaviour’ unacceptable. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’ I know, but . . . So…
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Reliving The Hardest Parts of Our Past
One of the hardest chapters for me to write was about what happened in a blue Volvo when I was about 5. It’s one of those #metoo stories I never told. Buried in my subconscious, it first raise it’s ugly head, when in my teens, my boyfriend and I played at having sex. When authors…
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The Shitty First Draft
Donna’s Book on Fire module on the Shitty First Draft really pissed me off. I know that every time I have a strong emotion around something, especially the kind of resistance I felt against the Shitty First Draft lesson – there’s something juicy in it for me to learn. I had to give this lesson…
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On Writing Memoir
I don’t want to write a memoir. It’s too raw and scary. Too ‘laying it all on the line,’ too vulnerable. I’m afraid I won’t find the #TRUTH, I’m afraid my story will be lopsided, with only my point of view. For whatever happened to me, happened because of something else that happened to someone else.…
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RESOURSES POST
Free personal brand checklist and workbook for career professionals and small business owners.
If you like these articles you will love my emails 🙂 They’re a roundup of what happened and lessons learned since my last email. I love a good email conversation. To me, emails stand as the last frontier of sharing our life writing. It is just like writing letters. Journaling and letter writing were two of my favourite things to do when I backpacked through Australia and Southeast Asia in the early ’90s. That’s when I met Shane. Email is the most intimate we can be with each other, over distance, through written words. If you like my writing you will love my emails. Get them here and I’ll see you, within minutes, in your inbox. Thank you for reading. I am grateful you are here. 🧡
Much Love and Light
Vig 🧡
Post List #3
Egypt ⛵️ Nile Cruise – Aswan By Night
The promenade is teeming with people taking their evening stroll along the banks of the Nile, or selling their wares of ‘Made in China’ souvenirs of Egyptian pharaohs, gods and monuments. We cross the busy road and trail off to…
Egypt ⛵️ Nile Cruise – Aswan High Dam and Temples of Philae
Aswan High Dam The 4-kilometre long embankment dam built across the Nile in Aswan created one of the largest man-made lakes in the world. With a surface area of more than 5,000 square kilometres, Lake Nasser spills across the border into Sudan and offer…
Egypt ⛵️ Nile Cruise – Kom Ombo and Edfu
Kom Ombo Temple An enigmatic ruin, Kom Ombo rises from the banks of the Nile. Once a major pilgrimage site for Ancient Egyptians, she is a dedication to Sobek the crocodile God and Horus, the Falcon God. Surrounded by walls…
Egypt ⛵️ Nile Cruise – Valley of the Kings and Queens and Colossi of Memnon
Valley of the Kings By 9 the next morning we’re chugging along on the little train that brings us to the tomb of Tutankhamun, but we don’t enter here. According to Ahmed the best place to visit King Tut is…